


A Stray Javelin

by Tierfal



Category: Doctor Who, Torchwood
Genre: Angst, Gen, Gen Fic, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-27
Updated: 2012-03-27
Packaged: 2017-11-02 14:27:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/370002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Fell off a cliff, trampled by horses, World War I, World War II, poison, starvation… stray javelin…</i> - Jack Harkness, "Utopia"</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Stray Javelin

**Author's Note:**

> ~*~Spoilers~*~ through DWS3/TWS1. Also a gift for Powdered_Opium. Written entirely while I was on the clock at work.

Jack particularly hates 1930.  Everyone’s still in a giant tizzy about the New York stock exchange, which has admittedly gone thoroughly kaput, and there’s nothing he can do about it—about any of it.  The greatest curse of immortality is the powerlessness.  Jack can prepare himself for what he knows, from various con-conduct history lessons, but he can’t help anyone else—not because it’ll create paradoxes, but because they just won’t listen.

They don’t believe him.  His attitudes and his verbiage are foreign and untrustworthy as it stands; adding the gift of prophecy nullifies any authority his opinions might have had.  He tries to give wise-sounding advice that just so happens to be a little prescient, but it’s a rare triumph when they buy in.  He couldn’t help the first World War, he won’t be able to stop the second, and he can’t convince a single soul that the Depression _will_ end, and life will go on.  He hasn’t even tried to explain that their world isn’t the only one that’ll keep on turning—not by a long shot.

It’s just hard—hard to remember cloaked ships and sonic blasters and the _best_ of companions; hard to have lost them all; hard to be left here, stranded, singular, with nothing but a malfunctioning VM to remind him of the good old days.  It’s hard to be stuck on a slow-thinking, slow-changing, prudish planet full of beautiful people whose concept of love won’t even comprehend him for decades and decades more.

This life—this unending, indestructible thing he calls _life_ , anyway; does it even count without the danger?—is essentially his personal quadrant of Tartarus.

He tries to focus on the fact that it’ll get better.  In fifty-seven short years, Rose will be born, and he can go stalk her until he gets arrested as a pedophile, and then he can while away twenty years or so in prison.

…boy.  Nothing like waiting out the Victorian Era to kill the ol’ optimism, which is apparently the only part of Jack that’s willing to go.

He kicks petulantly at the thin dusting of snow on the gravel; it’s in the process of melting and turning the entire road into a mud pit.  He misses sidewalks.  And pavement.  He misses the Doctor taking Rose’s hand, beaming like a madman, dragging her down the avenue as she laughed, and they passed in and out of the spotlights cast by streetlamps and neon signs—

Focus.  He can’t afford to get nostalgic; it makes him bitter, and when he’s bitter, he drinks, and when he drinks, he dies of alcohol poisoning and wakes up with a regular hangover _and_ the resurrection kind.

He sighs to himself and stops, leaning against a rickety fence assembled with homemade nails.  Two young men are running back and forth through this field, swamp of mud and halfhearted snow be damned, and he wishes he had their enthusiasm.  He’d already seen too much the first time he died; it’s just gotten to be a bad joke at this point. You can’t crack Jack.  Jack comes back.  Jack can’t escape into the blessed oblivion of eternal sleep, and he’s trapped here until he receives a miracle from deities he doesn’t believe in.

Ha, ha.

Jack rubs his face.  He can’t think like this.  However infuriating the present may be, there are a hundred-thousand things to look forward to—artists he knows will be famous; books he can get first-edition; companies to avoid and industries to invest in.  And there’s nothing to be afraid of, not a _damn_ thing, because nothing can touch him.  That’s something, isn’t it?  He’ll just keep moving, just keep nudging Torchwood in a direction certain deadbeat Doctors would be proud to see, just keep walking towards an eternal sunset.  He’ll just keep holding out and hanging on—there’s nothing else to do.  He’ll just keep getting hurt but never getting away, and someday his prince will come.

But first there comes a sharpened staff.

Jack screams and drops to the mud pit of a road, twitching, blinking, and bleeding all over the place.  There is a javelin in his chest.

A _javelin_.  In _1930_.  There’s a reason he’s avoided every Olympic Games, and this is pretty much it.

His solitary consolation prize is the lovely voice that rises as it comes closer, cursing like a sailor on a bad day, trilling through a few traditional Welsh profanities as well for good measure.

Nothing like a particularly violent death to put things in perspective.  Sometimes you just need a bolt from the blue.  Or, apparently, a stray javelin.

The young man who peeks into his field of vision—and, with a final string of expletives, proves himself to be the owner of the voice—is gorgeous, even by Jack’s standards.  Well, even by anyone’s standards; Jack finds gorgeousness in everything that breathes and sometimes things that don’t.  Gorgeous has windblown blond hair and stormy eyes and strong shoulders, the lattermost of which Jack supposes would be necessary in order to throw a stick with enough force to skewer passersby.

“Are you going to be all right?” Gorgeous asks desperately.  He follows up with another string of swear words, mixing English and Welsh indiscriminately this time.

Jack sighs, and bleeds, and smiles.  “I am now.”


End file.
